Jeep Grand Cherokee vs. Kia Borrego, Nissan Pathfinder, Toyota 4Runner ... - Car and Driver
is a city on the move—literally, about an inch every year, toward the northwest. Two immense slabs of the Earth’s crust, the Pacific plate and the North American plate—each one thousands of miles wide and 60 miles thick—are sideswiping each other in a geologic fender bender that has been under way for 30 million years. Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and most of California’s teeming cities and towns are sitting right on the rub strip, year by year lurching closer and closer to Alaska. Documenting faults is what we do here at C/D , so we selected four trucks with four-wheel drive and off-road pretensions and crawled deep into the seismic rift zones to the north and east of L. A. , looking for faults while in the, um, faults. The 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee is the newest, and we opted for the full, double-chili-with-onions Overland V-8 this time (we tested a low-option V-6 model in the September issue). Of the $45,240 as-tested price, the Off-Road Adventure II package (skid plates, a full-size spare, off-road tires, and 18-inch wheels) is responsible for just $275. Clearly, Jeep wants you out there getting dirty. The aging Nissan Pathfinder now also offers a V-8, but we instead locked and loaded a more well-rounded, $43,655 deluxe LE with a 4. 0-liter V-6, which also kept its price closer to the $40K mark. Source: www.caranddriver.com
